Historically, conventional, or “hard engineering” structures have been used to defend against erosion from adjacent water courses or water bodies. While effective, these techniques have proven to have considerable undesirable physical impacts of increasing erosion to adjacent land forms or other “down-stream” natural resources. This is primarily due to the hardness of these structures which reflect and/or transmit the energy contained in waves, currents, and scour from moving water onto the nearby landforms which have not been “hardened” through the installation of structural elements. The reflection of waves, currents, and scour results in increased erosion of adjacent resources such as beaches, tidal areas, subsurface features immersed in water, river courses, lakebeds, and important upland land features which often protect other structures such as homes, roadways, and utilities.
To address damage to adjacent resources, many regulatory agencies, environmental advocacy organizations, and environmental contractors have embraced bioengineering and the “Living Shoreline” approach, which is now a nationally-known campaign by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the United States of America. In some US states, state wetland regulations prohibit the use of conventional hard engineering structures to protect structures on properties. In these instances, “soft”, bioengineering measures such as those promoted by the NOAA Living Shoreline program are the only alternatives available for coastal property owners. Unfortunately, bioengineering measures promoted by the Living Shorelines program are not robust or structurally sound enough to defend against erosion in portions of the shoreline which are exposed to higher intensity storms such as oceanfront areas, coastal bays, larger estuaries, larger rivers, and lakes.
Conventional, environmentally friendly bioengineering approaches for stabilizing the base of landforms along exposed shorelines can provide structural integrity at the toe of landforms near the shoreline in order to stabilize these landforms. While these approaches are all somewhat effective at stabilizing exposed landforms, they are generally believed to have much lower success when used along ocean fronting land forms, within larger estuaries, larger rivers, and along the shorelines of larger lakes. It is important to note that an effective and reliable strategy for soft bioengineering methodology presently does not exist for most of the oceanfront, larger estuaries, larger rivers, and along the shorelines of larger lakes. Therefore, the owners of real estate must rely on conventional hard engineering structures, which typically exacerbate shoreline erosion in nearby locations or must rely on substandard soft engineering alternatives which are not robust enough for the given site conditions and level of exposure.